Communication of data over computer networks, particularly the Internet, has become an important, if not essential, way for many organizations and individuals to disseminate information. The Internet is a global network connecting millions of computers using a client-server architecture in which any computer connected to the Internet can potentially receive data from and send data to any other computer connected to the Internet. The Internet provides a variety of methods in which to communicate data, one of the most ubiquitous of which is the World Wide Web, also referred to as the web. Other methods for communicating data over the Internet include e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, telnet and FTP.
The World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers, typically called “web servers”, that support the documents and applications present on the World Wide Web.
Documents, known as web pages, may be transferred across the Internet according to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”) while applications may be run by a Java virtual machine present in an internet browser. Web pages are often organized into web sites that represent a site or location on the Web. The web pages within a web site can link to one or more web pages, files, or applications at the same web site or at other web sites. A user can access web pages using a browser program running on the user's computer or web-enabled device and can “click on” links in the web pages being viewed to access other web pages.
Each time the user clicks on a link, the browser program generates a request and communicates it to a web server hosting web pages or applications associated with the web site. The web server retrieves the requested web page or application from an application server or Java server and returns it to the browser program. Web pages and applications can provide a variety of content, including text, graphics, interactive gaming and audio and video content.
Because web pages and associated applications can display content and receive information from users, web sites have become popular for enabling commercial transactions. As web sites become more important to commerce, businesses are increasingly interested in quickly providing responses to user's requests. One way of accelerating responses to requests on a web site is to cache the web pages or applications delivered to the requesting user in order to allow faster access time to this content when it is next requested.
Conventional web content caching systems and methods generally enforce limits on cache size by employing a least-recently-used (LRU) algorithm. Generally, when a cache is at its limit and a new entry needs to be added to the cache, the entire cache is scanned and the cache entry that has been used the least recently is selected and then removed from the cache. This process may be repeated until enough room has been created in the cache for the new entry.